A Universe of Creativity and Curiosity
Photo taken by Patricia Arbona
And so Day One of Github Universe begins!
Github’s CEO Chris Wanstrath, also known as defunkt, commenced Github Universe by unveiling exciting, new features. Some of these new features included a refreshed redesign of Github’s profiles, unveiling the GraphQL API, and the project management tool Github Projects.
Photo taken by Patricia Arbona
Github Universe was located in a warehouse district near San Francisco’s Pier 70. On top of this warehouse was a giant Octocat!
In the main entrance of the conference, a majestic balloon Octocat strikes your eye.
We had came across Githubber Nikka Padilla.
Photo taken by Elom Gomez
All throughout Github Universe, our team periodically kept running into friends, colleagues, and mentors.
Photo taken by Rebekkah Murphy
In front of the Git Kraken, Patricia met Emma Koszinowski, one-half of San Francisco’s Rails Girls Summer of Code team from 2015…
…to later find the second-half of San Francisco’s RGSoC 2015 team, Karla Sandoval.
Photo taken by David Sommers
As fellows currently going through the program now, it was valuable to hear about Karla’s and Emma’s challenges and successes with their Rails Girls project.
Photo taken by Quinn Murphy
Our team attended the informative Open Source panel Pains and Gains: Five Short Stories, facilitated by Katrina Owen. Each panelist illuminated upon a particular challenge they faced in Open Source, and what strategies they employed to go about solving their unique challenges. After the panel, our team was fortunate enough to speak with two Rails Girls Summer of Code Project Maintainers, Katrina Owen, author of exercism.io and Gregor Martynus, Chief Dream Officer of Hoodie. Both Project Maintainers were welcoming, approachable, and humble in regards to their amazing accomplishments.
At the Heroku booth, our team was thrilled to meet up with an previous programming instructor, Cynthia Dueltgen.
Cynthia is currently having a fantastic experience as a Customer Solutions Architect at Heroku.
Our team thanked her for giving us foundational software development skills. Her patience teaching us difficult programming concepts was pivotal in our growth as software developers.
Cynthia was ecstatic to hear about our experiences in the world of Open Source!
Photo taken by Rebekkah Murphy
We ended a jam-packed day with a Big-Bang Benefit Concert, with proceeds going to Black Girls Who Code.
Common’s lyrics and rhymes were powerful! Common has an amazing stage-presence. His lyrics were very politically-aware.
Photo taken by Patricia Arbona
On Day Two of Github Universe
Team Hackbrighters came across Amanda Gelender, Senior Manager of Github’s Social Impact team. Amanda made it possible for our team to be hosted by Github for the duration of our fellowship. We are extremely grateful for Amanda and the Social Impact team’s time and generosity. Thank you for supporting women in Open Source!
Photo taken by Rebekkah Murphy
At lunch, our team met former GitHubbers Brandon Ferguson and Rachel Meyers. Brandon currently works at Travis CI, and Rachel was a Rails Girls Coach in 2015 and is founder of Opsolutely.com. Both imparted to us thoughtful advice in terms of how to grow professionally as a software developer.
Photo taken by Lynn Wallenstein
Our team attended an interesting Electron talk Making Electron Development Simpler, More Pleasant, and More Productive by Slack Desktop Engineer, Machisté Quintana.
Photo taken by Patricia Arbona
Machisté highlighted throughout his talk how there exist unique challenges when working with Electron, a cross-platform framework for desktop apps.
We also came across Travis CI foundation’s booth. Here we spoke with Konstantin Haas, Mathias Meyer, and Josh Kalderimis co-founders of Travis CI. Past and current Rails Girls fellows thanked the Travis foundation for creating and funding our fellowship. After intimately configuring and debugging Travis CI on Lektor, our team gave input as to how to improve the continuous integration system.
Photo taken by Rebekkah Murphy
Thank you Travis foundation for supporting past, current, and future women in Open Source.